The Wandering Jew — Volume 08 eBook

and Duke de Ligny, had left a wife in Russian exile,
while he (unable to follow Napoleon to St. Helena)
continued to fight the English in India by means of
Prince Djalma’s Sepoys, whom he drilled.
On the latter’s defeat, he had meant to accompany
his young friend to Europe, induced the more by finding
that the latter’s mother, a Frenchwoman, had
left him such another bronze medal as he knew his
wife to have had.

Unhappily, his wife had perished in Siberia, without
his knowing it, any more than he did, that she had
left twin daughters, Rose and Blanche. Fortunately
for them, one who had served their father in the Grenadiers
of the Guard. Francis Baudoin, nicknamed Dagobert,
undertook to fulfil the dying mother’s wishes,
inspired by the medal. Saving a check at Leipsic,
where one Morok the lion-tamer’s panther had
escaped from its cage and killed Dagobert’s
horse, and a subsequent imprisonment (which the Wandering
Jew’s succoring hand had terminated) the soldier
and his orphan charges had reached Paris in safety
and in time. But there, a renewal of the foe’s
attempt had gained its end. By skillful devices,
Dagobert and his son Agricola were drawn out of the
way while Rose and Blanche Simon were decoyed into
a nunnery, under the eyes of Dagobert’s wife.
But she had been bound against interfering by the influence
of the Jesuit confessional. The fourth was M.
Hardy, a manufacturer, and the fifth, Jacques Rennepont,
a drunken scamp of a workman, who were more easily
fended off, the latter in a sponging house, the former
by a friend’s lure. Adrienne de Cardoville,
daughter of the Count of Rennepont, who had also been
Duke of Cardoville, was the lady who had been unwarrantably
placed in the lunatic asylum. The fifth, unaware
of the medal, was Gabriel, a youth, who had been brought
up, though a foundling, in Dagobert’s family,
as a brother to Agricola. He had entered holy
orders, and more, was a Jesuit, in name though not
in heart. Unlike the others, his return from
abroad had been smoothed. He had signed away
all his future prospects, for the benefit of the order
of Loyola, and, moreover, executed a more complete
deed of transfer on the day, the 13th of February,
1832, when he, alone of the heirs, stood in the room
of the house, No. 3, Rue St. Francois, claiming what
was a vast surprise for the Jesuits, who, a hundred
and fifty years before, had discovered that Count
Marius de Rennepont had secreted a considerable amount
of his wealth, all of which had been confiscated to
them, in those painful days of dragoonings, and the
revocation of the Edict of Nantes. They had bargained
for some thirty or forty millions of francs to be theirs,
by educating Gabriel into resigning his inheritance
to them, but it was two hundred and twelve millions
which the Jesuit representatives (Father d’Aigrigny
and his secretary, Rodin) were amazed to hear their
nursling placed in possession of. They had the
treasure in their hands, in fact, when a woman of